Chapter 6: Glass

At nine that night, somebody knocked on Aunt Bernie's door, and she answered it with a rolling pin.

"Whoever you are, I've already called the police," she said through the screen.

"Ma'am, I'm Thane Rayburn," said the man on the porch. "I work with your niece."

"The one who called her a liar?"

He stood there with a banker's box in his arms and took it.

"Yes, ma'am."

Bernie looked him up and down for a long moment.

"Wipe your feet," she said, and she let him in.

I was sitting at the kitchen table in a sweatshirt of my father's, with the detective's card in front of me and a cold cup of tea.

I had not planned to see Thane again until the audit was over.

He set the box on a chair and did not sit.

"This is your entire personnel file," he said. "Every raise letter, every review, every direct deposit form. The committee approved me taking it."

"Why?"

"Because I want you to read it before anyone else tells you what's in it."

"Mr. Rayburn," Bernie said, from the stove, "do you eat?"

"Ma'am?"

"Sit down. I made too many rolls."

He sat.

I opened the box and took out the first raise letter, the one from my second year.

At the bottom, over his printed name, was his signature.

Under it was another one, mine, dated the same day.

Except it wasn't mine.

At the dinner, on a small screen, it had looked like mine.

On paper, I could see that every loop leaned the wrong way.

"That's not my handwriting," I said.